The NSVRC collects information and resources to assist those working to prevent sexual violence and to improve resources, outreach and response strategies. This resource section includes access to NSVRC collections and selected online resources.

This research translation provides a summary of key findings on sexual violence as a component of interpersonal violence that is the wider focus of the Global Status Report on Violence Prevention 2014. People working to end sexual violence can use these findings to inform data collection, prevention planning and evaluation, policy advocacy, and community partnerships.

Basile, Smith, Fowler, Walters, and Hamburger (2016) offer a window into the lived experiences of African American women in Sexual violence victimization and associations with health in a community sample of African American women. This research translation summarizes the article’s key findings to help support sexual violence prevention and response strategies with Black and African American communities.

This publication explores how sexual violence is portrayed in the news and considers the implications of these portrayals for prevention advocates and journalists interested in discussing not just the details of sexual violence, but also how to end it. The findings lay the foundation for ongoing work to define more effective messages about sexual violence that can support prevention policies.

This work is part of a multi-year collaboration between the National Sexual Violence Resource Center and Berkeley Media Studies Group.

The serial perpetration hypothesis — which suggests that a small number of men perpetrate the vast majority of rapes, and that these men perpetrate multiple rapes over time — has played an important role in the field of rape prevention as a model of sexual violence, especially raising awareness of rapists who have not been identified by the criminal justice system. A 2015 study published in JAMA Pediatrics, A Trajectory Analysis of the Campus Serial Rapist Assumption, raises questions about the serial perpetrator hypothesis.

Although it is clear that a subset of perpetrators do commit multiple acts of rape over time, the research suggests that most perpetrators do not chronically offend over time. Instead, perpetrators are much more heterogeneous in terms of their risk factors, methods of coercion, and pattern of offending over time.

Sexual violence can result in many health, economic, and social struggles in the lives of survivors. This resource highlights findings from a 2015 study on sexual violence against Latina women. Findings can help strengthen our prevention and response strategies with Latin@ communities. InSpanish.

This practitioner focused report of findings from a national research project on Sexual Assault Response Team functioning and effectiveness.

The full version of the technical research report to the National Institute of Justice is available online.Scientific publications of the data in peer-reviewed journals with full methodological details are also available.

In early 2014, the Department of Defense (DoD) asked the RAND National Defense Research Institute to conduct an independent assessment of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination in the military. The resulting study, the RAND Military Workplace Study (RMWS), invited close to 560,000 active- and reserve-component service members to participate in a survey fielded in August and September of 2014, making it one of the largest surveys of its kind ever conducted for DoD. More than 170,000 service members completed the survey. Compared with prior DoD studies, the RMWS takes a new approach to counting individuals in the military who experienced sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination in the past year.

The RMWS provides DoD with unprecedented detail on the frequency of criminal sexual assault against its members, the nature and context of those assaults, and how they differ for men and women in each branch of service. The study also provides new evidence on the prevalence and nature of sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the military. Detailed results, including recommendations, are documented in four comprehensive volumes (available at www.rand.org/surveys/rmws.html); some of the study's major conclusions about the experiences of DoD service members are highlighted in this brief.

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This site is supported by Grant/ Cooperative Agreement No. 1UF2CE002359-04 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.